Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I too today rise to speak on the Governor-General's address to this place on the opening of the 48th Parliament. Can I firstly express my absolute appreciation and gratitude to the people of South Australia for the privilege once again of serving them in this place and being sworn into the 48th Parliament. I can absolutely commit to the people of South Australia that I will continue, first and foremost, to fight hardest for their interests, as I have done in my previous 12 years—nearly 13 years—here, because in this place our first duty is always to represent the state that elected us to be here.

Right now, there couldn't be an issue that is more important to prosecute in this place on behalf of the people of South Australia than the absolutely devastating algal bloom that is occurring in the Gulf of St Vincent. We've known now for probably seven or eight months that this algal bloom is threatening marine life and the economic lives of those people that rely on the gulf for their livelihoods, whether that be the communities, the fishers, the tourism operators or the other businesses that are in those communities. This algal bloom has threatened them over the last six months. It continues to threaten them, and they remain in a state of incredible uncertainty because we don't actually know what our governments—both the state government and the federal government—are intending to do in order to support those communities and, most particularly, to understand what needs to be done to get rid of this algal bloom and ensure it doesn't happen again and then, of course, once the algal bloom has been dealt with in whatever way is appropriate, manage the cleanup that follows and support those communities as they get back on their feet.

I say that because, as I said, we've known about the algal bloom since December last year. There's been concern expressed, and yet very little was done. Very little has been done by the state government and the federal government. We now find ourselves in a situation where the algal bloom is quite catastrophic, and everybody is wondering what they are going to do to deal with this problem. We know that it is impacted by warmer weather. As we are now slowly creeping our way out of winter into spring, we know that the threat the algal bloom currently presents is only going to heighten.

So it's too little too late, but we now need to make sure that we are acting with absolute urgency to deal with this. We can't have a situation where our governments don't care about it when we see an impact on the beaches of Edithburgh and Stansbury. But I'm telling you that this will now hit the beaches of Brighton and Glenelg, and maybe then, as it hits our metropolitan beaches, we will see the government take this more seriously. Unfortunately the track records of this government and the one in South Australia have shown it only matters if it occurs in our cities.

One of the biggest issues that we saw during the last term and we saw during the election campaign—and Her Excellency the Governor-General raised it in her address to this parliament on behalf of the government that leads the 48th Parliament—was Medicare. I want to reflect on a matter of serious consequence to the Australian public, and that is the Albanese government's preparedness to continue to repeatedly mislead the Australian public about Medicare, particularly about whether you need your credit card or whether you are going to have out-of-pocket costs when you go to see your GP. During the campaign, the Prime Minister confidently declared on a number of occasions:

One card covers it all.

Not your credit card—your Medicare card.

He reiterated this promise in excess of 71 times during the campaign, promising all Australians would need is their Medicare card to see a GP for free.

The election goes by. Australians are continuously misled about the out-of-pocket costs that they are going to be paying. Australians also know right now they have never paid more out of their pockets when they go to see a GP. The Prime Minister, I think, knew what he was telling Australians wasn't true, but the sad fact is that now, following the election, we find out that the Prime Minister's own Department of Health and Aged Care, under FOI and the incoming government brief, confirms that the government's modelling showed that 25 per cent of GP clinics will not bulk-bill under the government's own policy framework. That statistic completely and utterly shatters the Prime Minister's promise to Australians that they would not require anything more than their Medicare card when they visited a GP.

We also see other independent and reliable sources like the RACGP, AMA, Cleanbill and the like, underpinning the report from the Department of Health and Aged Care in relation to the very unlikely chance of the quotes of the Prime Minister ever coming true, with reports from all of these organisations saying that GPs will not be in a position to be able to fully bulk-bill Australians, which is the promise the Prime Minister continuously made—in fact, it was made 71 times. And we also saw this week the Minister for Health and Ageing belled the cat in his recent comments to morning television, when he said:

We never said there'd be a hundred per cent bulk billing.

Well, I'd like to understand the difference between 100 per cent bulk-billing that the minister says they never promised and the Prime Minister promising Australians that all you would need is your Medicare card. I would really like to understand how the Prime Minister and the health minister can conceive they are saying the same thing. But the Prime Minister has been absolutely unequivocal in his promise to Australians.

Let me be clear, the coalition wants Australians to be able to get timely access to affordable healthcare. We hope the Prime Minister actually hasn't lied to Australians. Unfortunately, we fear that he has. And the worst part of it is that not only are Australians having to put their hand in their pocket every time they see their GP but the amount of money they have to pull out of their pocket has never been higher. Right now, out of pocket costs to see your GP are the highest they have ever been. They increased 45 per cent in the three years of the first term of the Albanese Labor government.

We've also seen bulk-billing rates falling from over 88 per cent when we left government to 77 per cent now. That is an 11 per cent drop in bulk-billing rates over the three years of the Albanese government, and yet many opposite still come in here and actually mislead this place by suggesting, for some reason, that bulk-billing rates have gone up under Labor. The facts, the statistics, the national accounts and your very own department's figures all show bulk-billing rates have plummeted by 11 per cent. As a result of that, last year alone there were 40 million fewer bulk-billed visits to our GPs in Australia. That's 40 million more visits to the GP where people have actually had to pay out-of-pocket costs, and they have risen on average to $48 per consultation.

As a result of this, people are not going to see the doctor, because, they say, they can't afford to do so. Last year, 1.5 million Australians said that they didn't visit their doctor because they couldn't afford to. That's 1.5 million Australians who were forced into making a decision between going to the doctor and putting food on the table, meeting their mortgage repayments and paying for their groceries, their electricity and their insurance. These are the decisions that are being forced upon Australians, and they are not decisions that Australians should ever be making. But the reality is that, when people avoid seeing the doctor and avoid getting primary care, they inevitably become sicker. Inevitably, when they become sicker, the place they end up in is our emergency departments or ramped in ambulances outside of our hospitals. Not only is that really bad for the person who's impacted; it also means there is additional pressure on our hospital systems. We know that, once you get sicker, the cost of that care is so much higher.

What we've seen is a government that has run around telling stories to Australians to try and hide from the fact that, by every metric in the healthcare system, it has failed Australians in the last three years. It is a national failure of this government. The Labor government came to power promising to strengthen Medicare, and, in reality, all this Labor government has done is weaken it. But, most distressingly, we have a Prime Minister who is prepared to lie to Australians about something as important as their access to health care. The reality is that Australians know that it's never been harder or more expensive to see a doctor.